WARNING Unmarked Spoilers Ahead!!!
Main Game
- The idea of Artifact Collection Agency is deconstructed when going through the incident reports, memos, and correspondence scattered around the Oldest House as it often mentions agents going mad, dying, or both. And as pointed out in one collectible found in the Foundation DLC, these agents have families who would be left wondering what happened to their loved ones. All because the FBC's purpose is to study and contain objects and forces beyond alll but the basic of human understanding.
- The Ordinary AWE.
- The children of Ordinary would go to the local dump to play (which is another kind of sad in itself) including Jesse and Dylan where the found the Slide Projector, an Object of Power that opened doors to other dimensions. They would use it to travel places and even invited a friend of Dylan named Neil to join them sometimes. Then The Bully Tom Barlow and his goons beat Neil up and made him tell them about the Slide Projector which they then stole. The end result was Tom and his friends becoming monstrous servants to an Eldritch Abomination called Not-Mother which attempted to invade our world.
- With Polaris's help, the Faden Siblings and other children stole and turned off the Object of Power; however in the aftermath several died and the entire adult population had mysteriously disappeared. Thus when the Bureau showed up and took both Dylan and the Slide Projector, Jesse had no-one and was forced to go on the run for the next 17 years.
- Worst of all is how this information is revealed and plays into the plot: the Hiss entered the Oldest House through the Projector thanks to them invading the mind of Director Trench. One can only imagine the feelings Jesse is feeling when she realized she's reliving what is basically the worst experience of her life.
- When the Hiss destroys Hedron aka Polaris: Jesse is devastated when she believes her lifelong companion is gone as the Hiss assert themselves and invade her mind. Later its revealed that while the HRAs were deactivated for a time, most is not all of the remaining staff didn't succumb right away like Jesse did. The implication being that she had passed straight through the Despair Event Horizon and became almost too easy a victim to their influence.
- Zachariah Trench's backstory as an agent where its revealed "his work followed him" home to his family. The details aren't elaborated on beyond that his daughter got sick as a result and because his wife insisted on taking her to civilian doctors instead of Darling and his team, thus their child passed away. Trench's wife left him soon after, leaving only the Bureau as all he had left in his life.
- During one of his Hotline calls, Trench reveals he considered taking a role in raising Dylan but nixed the idea in part due to the trauma of his daughter Susana's death. While Darling would've been needed and helpful in training his Parautilitarians abilities, he was a Mad Scientist and didn't really know anything about looking after a kid. One has to wonder how things would've turned out if Trench had taken a more involved approach to Dylan.
- On a related note, Dylan's treatment by the FBC is one of the saddest parts of the game. Despite wanting to groom Dylan to become the Director from a young age, the Bureau seemingly had no idea how to actually do that, leading to Dylan being simply placed in a bare cell for over a decade. Subjected to constant tests of his abilities, Dylan was constantly treated as a burden and as an uncooperative child for such offenses as not being able to tell the interviewer what day it was because no one gave him a calendar. After accidentally killing an agent during an outburst, Dylan's viability for the Director position was effectively given up on, and he was simply treated as a prisoner. Combined with his belief that Polaris abandoned him, is it any wonder Dylan wound up feeling so lonely, he thought he'd found a friend in the Hiss?
Collectibles
- The "Agent Death Notification" which is found early in the game, informing the parents of an agent named Graham Potts about their son's death. There's also the fact that to the public, the FBC is just a government agency meant to run logistics for government resources, something you wouldn't think people associate with danger.
- *While exploring the Black Rock Quarry, Jesse will find a letter from a Quarry worker named "B" to another called Linda: the letter informs her that Linda's husband David, another Quarry worker, was found after being missing for two weeks. He reported to Security who took David, half-starving and rambling, and given the context of the letter the Bureau chose not to inform his wife about what happened to him or that he was found.
Foundation DLC
- Marshal's fate. She had traveled into the titular Foundation in order to singlehandedly protect the Nail, one of the tethers that anchors the Oldest House and allows the Board to access it. However, as Jesse progresses through it turns out that Helen had some serious doubts about how benevolent the Board actually was. She ultimately chose to damage if not try to outright destroy it; this pissed the Board off and they retaliated by destroying her HRA. Needless to say, any trust Jesse may have had in the Board is gone and she decides to take the Bureau in a new direction.
Collectibles
- The "Computer Program" correspondence letter was sent by a random civilian to the US House of Representatives regarding her husband, who had recently been killed by a drunk driver. She claims that before his death, he read an article theorizing how the world is just a computer program, that she suspects he might have actually been killed as revenge for having yelled at the young "computer whiz" next door, and desperately requests them to "change the computer and make Francis come back." The fact the letter exists in the Oldest House suggests the FBC did investigate it, but given there's no further mention of it anywhere else in the game, it's greatly implied that his death was a completely mundane accident, and that she never got closure for trying to make sense out of a horribly meaningless loss.
AWE DLC
- The confirmation after several Easter Eggs confirm that Control takes place in the same universe as Alan Wake…and that American Nightmare was either All Just a Dream or All for Nothing (or both) as Alan is shown still trapped in the Dark Place. Worse, he has lost a good chunk of his sanity as he desperately attempts to find some way of defeating the Dark Presence and finally escape.
- Alice is revealed to be haunted by Mr. Scratch and even went to the Bureau in the hopes that they can help her. Unfortunately all this did was cause her to be an Unwitting Instigator of Doom as her presence in the Oldest House caused Hartman, who had become corrupted by the Dark Presence, to sense her presence, breach containment, and slaughter Bureau agents leading to the entire Investigation Department being sealed off.
- One side mission involves cleansing an Altered object in the form of an Eagle Limited train car. The goal is to "Connect With the Train", and entering it whisks you to a little Pocket Dimension in its interior where you have to puzzle together its Dark and Troubled Past, one involving a paracriminal group deliberately setting up an AWE that caused it to derail, resulting in 62 casualties and countless injuries of its innocent passengers. Listening to the catastrophe play out in audio is very spooky, but it's also quite somber to think that its victims were so traumatized by the experience that the train itself remains so haunted by it.Jesse: You had a pretty dark ride, huh?
